


I wake up. It's a bad dream.

by sandarenu



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Eating Disorders, Exorcisms, F/M, Graphic descriptions, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Murder, NSFW, Pegging, Porn, Violence, but only in dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-12
Updated: 2014-03-12
Packaged: 2018-01-15 11:17:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1302898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandarenu/pseuds/sandarenu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abbie’s stay in purgatory is littered with dreams involving a certain revolutionary soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I wake up. It's a bad dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. Nsfw. I just love this ship and wanted to try writing something. The title is taken from the Keane song ‘A Bad Dream’. Any feedback, good or bad, is highly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read it!

 

 

She loses count sometime after day 57.

It’s still the same damn dollhouse, pink and plastic and squeaky checkered floors. She searches for a way out hundreds of times to no avail. The windows are sealed and so are the doors, and no amount of force breaks the glass or the locks.

Abbie looks out the front door one day at the rising ‘sun’, or whatever the hell it is, just to realize she’s forgotten to keep count.

“Time’s a lot slower in here”, teenage Jenny supplies morosely.

“Than Earth?”

“Duh”, scoffs the other Abbie.

Abbie raises her eyebrows. “So what? You’re saying it could be, you know, just a minute or two on ground zero and that’s a day here or something?”

“Or something.” Jenny rolls her eyes.

“So I could be stuck here for-”

“Yep.”

…

 

She thinks she fractures her ribs trying to desperately climb the chimney. It’s a useless attempt, because some immovable force pushes her down before she’s even halfway up.

 

She’d figured out things like sleeping and eating and bathing weren’t really necessary in purgatory the first week in. Her hair isn’t growing out of its roots and her fingernails aren’t getting any longer. Everything smells like plastic and crayon and now, so does she. That ‘night’ though, one side of her body feeling sore and bruised and the migraine inside her head refusing to stop, Abbie collapses into a doll’s bed in one of the rooms.

 

 She wakes up in Ichabod Crane’s arms; the forest canopy a leafy halo around his disheveled hair.

“Crane-”

…

 

He kisses her.

There are arms around her and broad, hardened soldier’s hands supporting her back, and she feels long fingers tighten around her hair.

It’s too easy to surrender. He’s warm, too warm, and Abbie hasn’t touched a real thing, a human being, in months and months. He lets out a small moan when her lips part to his, and Abbie can feel the desperation when he presses even closer in the little hitch he has in his breath. She doesn’t realize she’s brought her hands up to frame his face until the nubs of her fingers are running through his beard, thicker than the last time she saw him.

She can feel leaves crunching below them when Crane gently moves her into his lap. She follows him where he wants her, her legs curling over his longer ones, her compass the point of warmth and softness that is his mouth. He bites down lightly on her upper lip and she moans softly. She lets out a hiccup when his tongue breaches into her, curling around her own and spreading a spark along her spine.

“Abbie”, he sighs when they finally break off, breathing into her. Her lips feel sensitive from his ministrations, and she can feel the tingle of the stubble burn around it. She is so relieved that he’s here, a solid presence, real and human and smelling like gun powder and smoke.

He tilts her head up to meet her lips again. This kiss is slower and smoother, and Abbie loses herself one more time.

There’s a warm hand sliding down her neck and Ichabod’s breathing a hitched “-god-” against her lips when she remembers Katrina and Henry Parish and seeing him in the memories Moloch had locked away.

“Ichabod-“ she stars, but he cuts her off swiftly, and oh, he’s good. He’s very good. That _mouth._

She forces herself to break the kiss off, and he latches onto the skin at her neck. Abbie shivers at the feeling of his stubble against her, and the hot insistent tongue and lips sucking at the juncture of her neck and shoulder.

“Ichabod, where’s Katrina?” she forces out.

He stops his ministrations abruptly. He looks up at her, blue eyes lost.

“Katrina? Your wife? And Henry Parish? What happened? How did you-”

Something flits across his face as he looks at her, just before a tsunami wall of water crashes through the trees to hit them.

Abbie wakes up back in the dollhouse, the slam of the tide still rattling her bones.

 

…

 

There’s a good day and a half after that when Abbie thinks she must be the crankiest she’s ever been, and that’s saying something, considering how angry she’d felt that first night in the dollhouse.

 

 _It was a dream_ , she tells herself. _I was in pain and I’m slowly going crazy from pink-walled cabin fever and this was some sick twisted dream where I was kissing the only guy who’s ever been a real friend to me. Right before we both drowned. Yeah._

 

It hadn’t felt like a dream though. Abbie’s never been the kind of person to have vivid dreams that felt real, not until the Sandman anyway, but this one had. She stands in front of the bathroom mirror and traces her lips, where the roughness of Crane’s stubble seemed committed to muscle memory. It had felt real. It had felt like she was not purgatory.

 

The self-loathing hits her hours later, ribs still hurting and only her thoughts to occupy her, thoughts about how Ichabod Crane has a wife, a wife who is out there on Earth with him now, a wife who he loves dearly. They dig inside her head until everything she thinks about is Crane. Then she feels sad, because she’s probably stuck here for something akin to eternity and that dream hadn’t helped anything.

 

She tries to stay awake, but it’s so terribly boring in here, and somewhere in between looking at the same damn kid’s painting and reliving the same memory of what Moloch had hidden from her and Jenny, and trying to fight off the dollhouse Jenny and Abbie’s repeated instances that she eat with them, she feels herself tiring. Abbie knows what that pot of ramen noodles tastes like –lots of oil and salt–, she used to make it everyday for Jenny while mum refused to get out of bed and later at their first foster home, and if purgatory’s trying to tempt her they really should be making more of an effort in her opinion.

 

She doesn’t even realize that she’s falling asleep. There’s a window of time between her staring at the dollhouse ceiling just before the whole space morphs.

 

…

 

She’s in a bathtub inside a woodsy, old-fashioned bathhouse. There’s a solid, warm body behind her and long, male legs bracketing her own in front of her, and Abbie knows by instinct that it’s Crane. She can’t shake off the sense of rightness, just knows she’s meant to be here, that she _belongs_ here, naked and leaning against his own unclothed body. Thoughts about Katrina and Parish and the impending apocalypse do not even enter her mind.

 

She brings up a hand to run over the tight curls of her wet hair just as he leans forward to drop a feathery kiss on her shoulder, and then her neck.

“You like that?” she finds herself asking with a smile.

“I like you, wife” he replies, a deep, sleepy rumble. She feels calloused palms moving up from the curve of her waist to cup her breasts, a capable thumb flicking a nipple. She feels an insistent pressure, his manhood, on her lower back, and giggles because his breath hitches when she subtly presses her hips against him.

 

 

She falls into him.

 

…

 

That time, she doesn’t remember anything about Katrina or Henry Parish. She doesn’t remember herself. The dream fades when they both fall asleep in the tub.

 

…

 

They get steadily worse, or better, depending on your point of view.

 

…

 

In no. 3 they’re kissing in her kitchen back in Sleepy Hollow, he’s pressing her into the mantle and he lets her rip his shirt off him, buttons scattering all over the place, and then a breathless gasp fills her ears when she unbuttons his trousers to move her palm against his stiffened cock.

 

Jenny and Abbie shake her from it to insist that she eat. She refuses again.

 

No. 4 finds them rolling around in a patch of grass near the forest, kissing like teenagers and biting hickies into each other’s throats. She’s wearing a summery dress in that dream (she hasn’t worn something like that since Luke broke up with her, she remembers later) and his capable fingers part her thighs and rid her of her underwear in record time. Then they’re working magic on her, pressing and rubbing against her clit, sliding into her warmth, his own arousal an obvious presence at her hip as he presses kisses down her body. He’s bunching her dress up to her breasts by the time he presses his lips to her core, and licks and licks until he’s making small noises against her, and she’s mewling and every part of her skin is a faraday’s cage of electricity. Abbie wakes up just as the orgasm punches through her. She curls her toes inside her boots and looks up to the dollhouse ceiling.

 

No. 5 is a joke; they’re in the backseat of her car right in front of the police station, and she’s getting him off in hard, fast strokes with her hands, whispering filth in his ear in a way that is completely unlike her, and he’s coming with a hoarse shout, and kissing her in gratitude, and there are people walking around the car for fuck’s sake, like they can’t see them inside, and then she presses her cum coated fingers to his lips and he licks them, his pupils blown open; no. 6 is in her bedroom back in sleepy hollow, and he’s fucking into her from behind, pressing her against the mattress with his own weight, an insistent mouth at the back of her neck and arms parting her legs with no resistance, and Abbie moans and moans and cries out, because it’s too much and he’s so strong, and he’s hitting her sweet spot over and over until he’s her entire world.

 

No. 7 starts in the middle of Abbie riding him, her hips moving slow and steady over him as she works him into her. Crane makes an aborted move to grab at her hips, maybe insist on a faster pace, but she throws him a look, tells him, “Stay still”, and he curls his fingers into the bed sheets instead, sweat dripping down his skin in the effort. It seems to go on forever, until Abbie’s sure her cunt can’t remember what it feels like to not have him in her, filling her, and she coaxes the orgasm out of him slowly, and he sounds drunk and completely wiped out when he comes. In no. 8 she’s riding his face, and he’s holding her up by the hips against his mouth like she weighs nothing. Ichabod moves his lips into and against her like a man starved, and swipes a tongue past the nub of her clit over and over again until she’s pressing into him and backing away at the same time, because it’s too much pleasure, and the entirety of her skin feels like it’s on fire. After the first time, he presses her down onto the bed to lick into her more, and slides long fingers into her to coax one more out of her.

9 is biting and scratching and tearing off clothes; 10 is a strip tease; 11 feels like a honeymoon, and they’re slow and gentle and they whisper ‘ _I love you_ ’s into each other’s mouths as they make love; and 12 is News Year’s Eve, 2001 at a Soho Night Club she used to frequent back in her junkie days, and Ichabod’s the hipster she picks up and does a quick and dirty with in the dingy bathrooms. 13 is her teasing him, her mouth kissing and sucking along his shaft, her lips sealing around him, and he’s moaning when she looks up at him through her eyelashes, but then she’s giggling because his face looks weird from this angle, and he’s laughing with her, a gentle hand in her hair, and an even gentler, “my love”, kissed into her hand.

 

No. 14 is deranged and Abbie feels hot remembering it later, wonders where it came from, because she’s never done it in real life with any of her old boyfriends nor heard of anyone who has. He’s on his back and she’s knelt between his long legs, his cock hard against his stomach, and she’s working her vibrator into him slowly, the rubbery sound of the lube inside him and his restrained gasps of pleasure the only sounds in the room. She changes settings when it’s inside him, and the head is now faster and pumping a slow circle in him, and he jumps and shouts when it hits something inside, and he insists on it, “more, more, please Abbie”, he begs, and before she knows it, she’s fucking into him in long hard strokes and pulling his cock with her other hand, and Crane’s eyes roll into his head when he comes, his knuckles white against her wrist, white streaks coating his abdomen muscles and legs shaking.

“Love you,” he sighs into her hair.

 

…

 

It’s always the same damned sequence of events.

 

Abbie falls asleep from exhaustion, a possibly infected wound and possible internal bleeding (purgatory is static in every sense; she does not need to eat or bathe or sleep, and by the same logic her bruises haven’t gotten any better), and she wakes up in some random new setting, and then it’s a full feature porno starring Ichabod Crane.

 

She thinks she’d be walking around with a permanent blush on her face if she had paler skin.

 

She really doesn’t need her mind to rebel against her, she thinks, to continually insist on showing her how much of a needy, pathetic cheater she wants to be. She’s dreaming about being called ‘wife’ by a man who already has one, and that’s a level of loser she hasn’t felt since she was eighteen. She’s embarrassed and aroused and angry. Why isn’t she dreaming about escaping purgatory, guns blazing? Rebuilding her relationship with Jenny? Hell, having a complete family again, mom and dad and Jenny and a Christmas tree and eating dinner together without the alcoholism and nervous breakdowns, wouldn’t that be one of her innermost desires? Apparently not.

 

“Let me out, you fucking bastard!” she screams one day while she’s kicking at the front door.

 

Maybe this is another one of Moloch’s sick games. Maybe it’s not Abbie after all, she thinks. Maybe Mr. Ugly Horns has tapped into her brain somehow and is controlling her dreams. Trying to throw her off.

 

 She can literally feel herself cranking up a dial labeled ‘denial’ inside her head.

After the fifteenth time, when Abbie wakes up wobbly-legged from Crane fucking her against a wall somewhere in Corbin’s cabin, her legs wrapped around her hips and the strength in his arms rippling through his lean muscles (and it’s _not funny_ how much Abbie remembers it, how real the slip and slide of it and the liquid hot pleasure he coaxed from inside her feels, and also hello, she has a thing about being manhandled), Abbie starts to rationalize it as a strictly sex thing.

 

So what, Crane’s a good looking guy and Abbie’s probably been stuck in here for six months at this point. Maybe the wife thing was some kind of fetish. Attractive white guy with an English accent goes through every fucked up thing that’s happened to her in the last year by her side, of course she’s gonna dream about having hot sex with him and being called his wife. She knows she’s a little bit fucked up. There are probably a few daddy issues feeding this thing. There’s probably an Oprah Special and a Tyra Banks Panel Discussion about it somewhere on the Internet.

…

 

Later she laughs bitterly, because after that the dreams change.

 

…

 

In the next dream she opens her eyes right into the middle of them crashing through the forest, running from the ghost of a man who killed three of his students. She doesn’t question how she knows this because it’s been the staple of her dreams; she falls right into the middle of them and knows enough so that she can’t question why she’s here.

They run and run until they’re out of breath and the ghost seems to have lost track of them.

“We have to burn the bones”, she finds herself telling Crane.

Crane holds up the dirt-covered bag he’s been carrying.

“We must hasten, Lieutenant.”

They pour kerosene on it together (and the fuel is just magically there, stupid dream logic) and light it up. Just as the flames are about to explode higher, the ghost emerges out of the trees and sticks a knife in Crane’s heart.

She screams as he crashes into her.

The grip of his fingers against her loosens gradually, and blood squirts out of the wound like something out of a slasher flick.

She cries and cries and curses at God, tries to bargain with Crane, “-you can’t die, Ichabod, I’m not gonna let you, come on, you’re fine-”, but it’s to no avail, and Abbie watches the life leave his eyes as she cradles his head in her arms.

 

…

 

After that it’s brutal.

 

It’s the Headless Horseman, clinically beheading him right in front of her. It’s a very human serial killer, slashing his throat with the precision of a surgeon. It’s the golem, burying him in a puddle of mud. It’s an entire forest, trapping him with roots and dragging him into the Earth.

 

…

 

The worst time is when it’s a demon inside her, possessing her, and her screams don’t reach anyone outside her own head. He backs away into a wall until he can’t walk any further, and he says, “Abbie, if you can hear me, this is not your fault” in a heartbreaking voice, just before the demon kills him, stabs him again and again with her hands.

 

…

 

He dies every time. Abbie can only watch it happening, unable to stop it. She goes through the same cycle of emotions, denial, then insurmountable grief, and anger, lots of anger. She cries and cries, and tries to find a pulse while blood coats her up to her elbows. It’s only when she wakes up that she realizes it wasn’t real.

 

…

 

It feels like it’s been a year. She stops fighting.

 

…

 

There is a certain skill to worming one’s way out of a tangle of tree roots and digging out of one’s own grave, Ichabod thinks, and blesses the soldier’s intuition that had resulted in him carrying a small pocket knife on his body at all times. The first cut is the hardest; his arms are pinned to his sides and he’s steadily losing feeling in his legs, but Ichabod hadn’t marched through the winter of 1776 and starved for weeks on end whilst still aiming his gun at the redcoats in a multitude of battles for nothing.

He does however, tire out after the fifth desperate cut, and passes out mercifully from the lack of air.

…

 

“Wake the fuck up, Crane”, bellows an angry, female voice, and he opens his eyes to behold a battered Miss Jenny Mills. The entire left side of her head is bandaged up, and one arm is in a sling, seemingly broken.

“Where am I?”

“At the hospital. You’re okay, right?” she asks harshly.

He isn’t buried alive underground, so yes, he thinks he is.

“Are you?” he asks her.

She grimaces.

“Headless horseman dickface got me into a car accident. Dickhead probably doesn’t know airbags exist these days. I got out of the wreckage eventually and hitched a ride to the hospital. Ran into some dude on his way to New York.” She raises a hand to acknowledge a ragged looking man with a very bushy beard across the ward. “Promised him a bag of good weed from Chase’s militia compound.” She rolls her eyes. “Then I ran through the forest looking for the spot me and Abbie saw the trees last 13 years ago. There was a patch of dirt disturbed on the ground. Looked suspicious. So I dug down until I found you.”

“My thanks.”

“You know bloody cotton ball eating Henry is-”

“He’s my son”, he says, the betrayal dripping off his voice.

“I was gonna say a bag of dicks who betrayed us, but uh, _what_?”

He tells her what happened in clipped, angry tones.

“So Abbie’s stuck in purgatory and Katrina got kidnapped by Headless? And Henry Parish is your screwed up son?”

He nods.

“Your family’s even more messed up than mine.”

He can’t find it in himself to disagree.

She slams a fist against the wall. “Dammit, Abbie’s stuck in there, Crane!”

He stifles a sob. “I am so sorry-” he starts to say, but she interrupts.

“Spare it. We have to try the spell you and Abbie did to get into purgatory. Then we’ve gotta find your wife”, she tells him.

She gets them out of the ‘ER’ within the hour courtesy of a few forged documents that tell them they’re FBI agents on an important mission. Crane doesn’t comment.

She gets angrier when they’re thrown violently against the trees after they try the incantation and fail. He just feels numb.

“Katrina’s our only hope,” she tells him, world-weary. He nods.

“I just hope she is alright” he replies, resisting the urge to vomit his last meal at the thought of what the horseman could do to her; what Abbie must be going through in purgatory under the watchful eye of Moloch.

 

…

 

All of it is his fault.

He is the lowest form of scum there could be.

 

…

 

They chase a story about a beheading of a group of librarians in Manhattan to find Katrina standing over the lifeless, still headless body of Abraham Van Brunt.

Ichabod makes to run to her, but she holds a bloodied hand up to stop him.

“He killed a faction of my coven.” She says quietly, wiping blood off her skirts. “I suppose he got complacent, thought me a silly woman kidnapped for anything he fancied. He was weakened by a spell one of my brothers placed on him before he was killed, and I took the opportunity to rid him of this body.”

“Is the horseman dead, then?” Jenny asks.

Katrina shakes her head. “He has already found another vessel a thousand leagues from here. I simply made this body too damaged for him to use it. I carved the heart out, and placed a spell.”

He finds he needs to speak up.

“Katrina, my love-”

“Ichabod, no”, she interrupts, her stare steely. “I have spent eons, millennia, trapped in purgatory and devoid of my power, and now I must pursue this vermin to the ends of the earth if I must. Purgatory has a way of amplifying one’s innermost fears and one’s innermost desires, and I shall not bear another day of it. He killed half of my coven. The life we knew is over.”

Ichabod feels a coldness enter his heart. Abigail Mills was still in purgatory. Was Katrina breaking her promise?

“Katrina, dear heart, this is not-, Lieutenant Mills-”

“You can get her out without me”, she replies. “There is a man by the name of Andra Jarid. He is a witchdoctor not a minute’s walk from here. He knows me, and he has found a different way to purgatory. Go to him.”

She pauses to kick the horseman’s body. It wilts gradually, until the dust gathers into an infinitesimal point and disappears.

“Farewell”, she says simply, and when he blinks, she is gone, a wedding ring clattering to the floor where she once stood.

…

 

They find Mr. Andra Jarid six months later where she said they would. He’s been avoiding them, flying in and out of the States and running red lights in California trying to avoid one of Miss Jenny’s friends, but he hands them a jar of foul blue liquid when she threatens him with a knife.

“Goddamn Katrina”, Jarid curses.

“How does it work?” Ichabod demands.

He grits his teeth.

“It’s kamala. Potent enough to breach the barriers between worlds. Drink it in, you get transplanted into a dream, and the person stuck in purgatory meets you there. You drink it again in the dream, pop, you’re back on earth.”

“That easy, huh?” Jenny asks skeptically.

Jarid smirks at her. “Yeah.”

“You tried this before?” she goads further.

“Sure”, he says simply, his face betraying nothing.

“If you are lying, Sir, rest assured we will not rest until justice is served”, Ichabod bellows. This man is irritating. Does he not understand how crucial rescuing Lieutenant Mills is?

“You can’t do jack. I’m a witchdoctor. I could-”

“I don’t see you doing anything right now”, Jenny points out, the knife digging into his neck, and he shuts up.

“I will do it”, Ichabod tells Miss Jenny later.

“He could be lying.”

“I will place myself in any danger I must. It is my responsibility that your sister come out unscathed.”

She looks pained. “Crane-”

He downs the foul concoction before she can protest, and thinks about the numerous times he and the Abbie had faced death together. When the liquid takes over his heart, he knows with complete clarity that he would give his life for her.

 

…

 

 

It’s probably been a decade.

The gory dreams don’t stop. She misses the first few ones, when she could watch Crane crying out in pleasure instead of in deathly pain, and holds onto them.

 

She feels old. She hasn’t aged in years.

 

She tries kicking down the doors every day, but the dollhouse doesn’t bulge.

The ribs aren’t healed, and she passes out into her dreams every night. He dies and dies again.

 

She kneels down once to pray, to plead to a merciful God, but it hurts her too much. There is a ghost of a memory haunting her, the memory of her mother pressing her into the mattress as she screamed a prayer for an exorcism, a cross digging into her forehead-

 

She breaks the mirror in the dollhouse bathroom.

 

Teenage Jenny and teenage Abbie reach the limits of their memories. This Abbie doesn’t remember hopping around cornfields with Jenny the year dad had taught at, and consequently gotten fired from, a secondary school in rural Iowa. This Jenny doesn’t remember being four and making forts out of dad’s empty bottles in the backyard in Tarrytown, in that first house mum and dad had bought together during happier times. She doesn’t remember running away with Abbie to New York City one weekend when they were 10, doesn’t remember the Saturday night lights and giggling at the handsome men and women walking past them in fancy business suits, and watching a Union Workers’ strike on Times Square, only to come back to a mother who hadn’t realized they were missing.

 

They remember seeing Moloch, and they remember finding the dollhouse. They insist that she eat the same stupid pot of ramen noodles, and she refuses. They go away, leaving her to her own thoughts.

 

She succumbs instead to her nightmares.

…

 

Mercifully, there is a last time.

…

 

The next dream she passes out into, he’s Ichabod Crane as she first met him, the long military coat and boots and the hair in a half ponytail. She’s in her khaki police uniform. They’re on the bleaches of an empty baseball field, the one she took him to a few times.

He’s looking at her like he’s seen a ghost.

“Abbie-” he starts, but Abbie is quicker, and launches herself at him.

He recoils when the momentum of her hits him, but he’s too solid, taller and broader than she is, and catches her easily. Her name dies into a mumble of half-hearted protests when she attacks his lips, so relieved that she isn’t at another one of his gruesome death scenes. She’ll take anything before that, a weird sex dream, a hunt, anything.

 

For a moment he kisses back, his hands coming around her waist to support her, the two of them swaying slightly in one spot. Abbie’s feet are barely touching the ground.

 

She’s so caught up in him and her emotions and the feel of his hair on her fingertips, that she doesn’t realize he’s stopped kissing back until he presses a firm hand onto her shoulder to separate them.

She breaks the kiss, confused. His face is redder than a tomato.

He clears his throat a few times and flutters his fingers, his eyes wide and trying to avoid eye contact.

 “Certainly not the welcome I was expecting” he manages to say.

She feels like a small animal is dying inside her.

She remembers everything. This isn’t like the other dreams.

 “Crane”, she says slowly, and brings up her closed fist near him.

He bumps it with his own.

“Lieutenant, I-“

“It’s really you.”

“Yes. Yes. Miss Jenny and I found a way out-, I, um, I apologize, I’m being so utterly rude, you can’t imagine my relief that you are safe. I’m just a tad vexed, you see-”

Abbie would settle for Moloch charging in and dragging her into the ground at this point.

“Crane, I’m so sorry-“

He blabbers.

“-Oh, nonsense, what’s a kiss if it be between friends. I should be apologizing. I got you into this horrible precedent-”

“-I thought you were someone else-”

He brings his elegant hands to his face, concerned.

“Surely I look like myself?”

“No, I mean, yeah, you do.” Abbie’s entire face is on fire. He’s here, she tells herself. It’s really him. He knows a way to get her out-

 _And you kissed him_ , her brain helpfully supplies. _Another friendship ruined_. _Way to go, Abbie Slut-bag Mills._

“That’s not what I meant,” she finishes lamely.

A look of fondness breaks through the guilt on his face.

“As your generation is wont to say,” he says, shrugging with a grimace, “you only live once. Or twice, in my instance, I suppose.”

She scoffs, and he smiles slightly.

He holds out a vial of blue liquid at her.

“It’s kamala. It’ll connect us to my dreams back on Earth, and we’ll be able to move from the dream back to real life.”

“Wow.”

When she makes to take it from him, he wraps a hand around her wrist to bring her forward towards him, and hugs her snugly.

“I apologize that I took so long to get to you.”

She’s still burning.

“I’m sorry I kissed you,” she mutters into his chest.

He shushes her.

…

 

When they both down the kamala, the only thing she knows is real is the pressure of Crane’s calloused palm against hers.

 

…

 

He thinks he’ll remember the pressure of her lips forever.

 

…

 

Miss Jenny shows her affection and worry by chopping up firewood and chasing up leads to kill the horseman in between visiting Frank Irving in prison and stalking back home angry, angry at the system, the government, and the world. She forces her sister into a shower and holds her hand while Abbie cries; reverently dries her hair afterwards, combing it into tight curls that she carefully rubs coconut oil into.

 

In between, she grabs onto Abbie and envelopes her in hugs that she doesn’t break for an eternity, and tries to hide the tear tracks in her cheeks. Ichabod sees them sometimes as he’s preparing dinner, whispering into each other’s ears in the language of twins, Jenny telling her in short snippets about what happened to them, about Katrina’s fate and Irving’s next hearing. Abbie presses kisses all over her face, and tells her little sister that she’ll never leave her again, that she’ll always have her back.

 

…

 

He throws a pair of wedding rings into the Hudson.

 

…

 

He watches over her all hours of the day.

 

She is on ‘sick leave’, as Miss Jenny informs him, but she carries no visible scars. Yet there is an unhinging in Abbie’s eyes and the way she carefully looks at Ichabod when she is awake, like she expects him to disappear at any time, which stops him from leaving her for even one moment. She remains tight lipped about her tribulations in purgatory, but he knows from the way she finds eating a chore, the way she forgets to have her meals most days if he doesn’t prompt her, and the way she ghosts her hands over an imaginary wound against her ribs. He is a man forged from war, and he knows.

…

 

She’s a coward. He doesn’t need to know.

 _He’s your best friend_.

She waits.

…

 

“A lot of things happened. I need to tell you”, she tells him, her voice hoarse from not being used.

He pauses to regard her. “You survived, Abbie. Whatever Moloch put you through, you were the stronger force, and you prevailed. You are safe now, and that is all I could ever want.”

“I need to tell you”, she says, firmly.

He waits.

…

 

One morning, the first she gets out of bed on her own, he makes her eggs, scrambled the way she likes them, whilst she entwines a fragile hand around his own.

 

There’s a moment right then, as the early light is streaming through her hair, a small smile gracing her lips, and she’s looking at him with stars in her doe-shaped eyes, when he knows he’s ready, knows with all his heart that he would die if he didn’t kiss her.

 

 

He falls.

  


 

_Fin._


End file.
